The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (27 page)

“There were neither witches nor bewitched,” observed one astute Spanish inquisitor, Alonzo Salazar y Frias, who preferred to concentrate on the persecution of Jews and Muslims, “until they were talked about.”
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Even after the witch-bull, the fact is that witch-hunting was never the exclusive domain of the Inquisition. Kramer and Sprenger, perhaps seeking to lighten the workload of their fellow inquisitors, insisted that the Inquisition needed to concern itself only with those accused witches who were also guilty of heresy. By way of example they pointed out that a witch who cast a communion wafer into the mud “to satisfy the devil, and this by reason of some pact with him,” was not guilty of heresy if she truly believed the wafer to be the body of Christ. No better evidence can be found that heresy was always a thought-crime: “The deeds of witches need involve no error in faith, however great the sin may be,” argue the authors of
Hammer of Witches,
“in which case they are not liable to the Court of the Inquisition, but are left to their own judges,” that is, the ordinary ecclesiastical and civil courts.
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Like so many other heresy-hunters, Kramer and Sprenger engaged in hateful and prurient speculation about human sexuality in general and, especially, the sexual excesses of women. “[S]he is more carnal than a man, as is clear from her many carnal abominations,” they assert, echoing the biblical distaste for menstruation. “All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable,” they continue. “Wherefore for the sake of fulfilling their lust, they consort even with devils.” Once seduced by the Devil, women are charged by their satanic master to “infect with witchcraft the venereal act” by, among other things, exciting men to sexual passion and then making their genitals disappear or otherwise preventing orgasm and conception, causing infertility in other women, “procuring abortions,” and turning babies and children over to the Devil to satisfy his vile appetites.

To understand why
Hammer of Witches
has been called “scholastic pornography” and “an amalgam of Monty Python and
Mein Kampf,
” we need only pause and consider its meticulous attention to the function (and malfunction) of the male sexual organ.
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“[W]hen the member is in no way stirred, and can never perform the act of coition, this is a sign of frigidity of nature,” Kramer and Sprenger explain, “but when it is stirred and becomes erect, but yet cannot perform, it is a sign of witchcraft.”
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Armed with such texts, and newly mandated by the pope to seek out heretics who also happened to be witches, the Inquisition put itself in service to the “hunts and panics” that characterized the Witch Craze over the next three centuries. Yet again, the inquisitors veiled their atrocities under the thin drapery of canon law, and they slandered their victims as agents of the Devil who deserved no sympathy from good Christians. The sheer number of women burned as witches far exceeds the body count of the medieval Inquisition, and the scandalous scenes that were conjured up by the witch-hunters to justify the carnage would not be matched until the Marquis de Sade began to put down on paper the inventions of his own disturbed imagination.
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A standard set of outrages came to be ascribed to the women who were persecuted during the Witch Craze, which continued to flare up in fits and starts from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. They were said to have entered into a pact with the Devil by which they put themselves in his service, sexually and otherwise, in exchange for the power to afflict the good Christians among whom they lived. Thus recruited and initiated, they were imagined to be members of a vast conspiracy of Devil worshippers and magic-workers far worse than the original victims of the Inquisition.

The sign of the pact was a mark on the flesh, the so-called Devil’s mark, which was supposedly insensitive to pain, and the witch was provided with demonic servants known as familiars, who often took the form of black cats or other black-furred beasts. It was believed that the witches flew by night to some forest clearing or forgotten cemetery or ruined castle where they worshipped the Devil in a ceremony strikingly similar in every detail to the rituals attributed by pagan Rome to the first Christians and by the Inquisition to the Cathars and Waldensians—an “obscene kiss” on the anus or penis, a wild sexual orgy, a feast that featured the tender flesh of murdered babies. From these raw materials emerged the standard iconography of witchcraft that is found today only in Halloween costumes and decorations—and only in an expurgated version that has been rendered safe for children.

Witches were believed to possess both the ability and the desire to work all kinds of deadly mischief on their adversaries and enemies, all with the active assistance of the Devil and his demons—sterility or impotence, miscarriages and stillbirths, illness or madness, or death. They were believed to be able to change the natural order of things, causing rain out of season or no rain at all, the sickening of cattle, and the blighting of crops. Above all, they were thought to seek the flesh of unbaptized babies for use in making their potions and brews, including one that supposedly enabled the witch to fly and another that empowered her to remain silent under torture. The Latin word commonly used for witchcraft—
maleficium
—literally means “wrongdoing” and carried the implication that the power to inflict harm on others was derived from the Devil and achieved by resort to black magic.

The gathering of witches for a worship service—at first called a synagogue, then a sabbat, and only much later a black Sabbath—was portrayed in detail by the inquisitors and their fellow witch-hunters, who seemed to delight to piling atrocity upon atrocity and describing every revolting detail. According to the febrile imaginations of the witch-hunters, the Devil manifested as an outsized monster, black in color and crowned with horns, part man, part goat, part bird. The witches kissed him on the left foot, or the anus, or the penis; if the anus was the site of the “obscene kiss,” then the Devil “acknowledged their attentions in a peculiarly noxious manner,” that is, he defecated on their faces and into their mouths. He heard their confessions, and he punished them for their sins, which might include going to church or slacking off on their acts of sorcery. He preached a sermon and received offerings of coins and foodstuffs. He presided over a grotesque version of the Communion, passing out the sole of a shoe in place of the wafer and “a nauseous black liquid” in place of the wine.
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Then the Devil and his minions turned to feasting. The menu, of course, featured roasted baby flesh, as well as wine “tasting like manure drainings.” Then, at the sound of pipes, drums, and trumpets, the witches would gather for the dancing that served, quite literally, as the climax of the sabbat. One woman bent over until her head touched the ground, and a candle was planted in her anus to illuminate the festivities. The witches would dance in a circle around the inverted woman, faster and faster, until they spun into a “frantic and erotic orgy in which all things, including sodomy and incest, were permitted.” At the climax of the festivities, the Devil would fornicate in various sexual positions with every man, woman, and child in attendance. Only then would the witches return to their homes to do the Devil’s bidding and afflict the good Christians who were their sworn enemies.

More than one reader of such accounts, of course, found them not only ludicrous but downright laughable.
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“Every night these ill-advised ladies were anointing themselves with ‘devil’s grease,’ made out of the fat of murdered infants, and, thus lubricated, were slipping through cracks and keyholes and up chimneys, mounting on broomsticks or spindles or airborne goats, and flying off on a long and inexpressibly wearisome aerial journey to a diabolical rendezvous, the witches’ sabbat,” writes historian Hugh Trevor-Roper in a kind of summing-up of the obscene and preposterous fairy tales that constituted evidence against the flesh-and-blood victims of the Witch Craze. “In every country there were hundreds of such sabbats, more numerous and more crowded than race-meetings or fairs.”
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As the sarcasm in Trevor-Roper’s account suggests, the supposed practices of sorcerers and sorceresses were fabricated out of the same whole cloth that was used to tailor the accusations against other victims of the Inquisition. To be sure, a few of the ancient folk traditions still practiced in medieval Europe—herbal remedies, fertility rites, and even some aspects of midwifery—might have been regarded as acts of practical magic, at least as the inquisitors defined it. Ordinary men and women, then as now, were amused by fortune-telling and comforted by amulets and talismans, none of which was officially countenanced by the Church. They told their children folktales and fairy tales whose characters and incidents were fanciful and sometimes magical. Even such luminaries as Roger Bacon, the Franciscan monk who is credited with a crucial role in the early stirring of science in western Europe, did not draw a bright line between magic and scientific inquiry. But the conjurations of the witch-hunters surely owed far more to their own dark fears and secret longings than to the actual deeds of the women whom they singled out for slander and murder.

“Jacob Grimm established that certain folk beliefs, including beliefs about fertility, entered into the picture of the sabbat,” explains Norman Cohn, “but that proves nothing about the reality of the sabbat.”
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Some historians have argued that at least a grain of truth can be found at the root of these horror stories, a survival of the pagan beliefs and practices that had always constituted an “underground religion” and only much later came to be called witchcraft when it caught the attention of the Church at the outset of the Inquisition. “Even so skeptical (and anticlerical) a historian as Henry Charles Lea thought so,” observes Cohn, “and today it is still widely assumed that such a cult must have existed.” But other scholars, including Hugh Trevor-Roper, insist that Devil worship in general and the cult of witches in particular are purely mythic. “There is in fact no serious evidence for the existence of such a sect of Devil-worshippers anywhere in medieval Europe,” insists Cohn. “One can go further: there is serious evidence to the contrary.” The best such evidence is to be found in the inquisitor’s manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich, both of whom offer advice only on hunting down the occasional practitioner of black magic—“sorcerers, fortune-tellers and those who summon demons,” according to Gui’s manual. “In fact, neither Eymerich nor Gui even hint at the existence of a sect of Devil-worshippers,” writes Cohn, “and that should settle the question.”
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By a certain irony, modern feminist historians and polemicists proudly affirm that the Witch Craze was inspired by the existence of an underground community of women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, including midwives and folk healers, whose purpose in gathering was “trading herbal lore and passing on the news.” Even if these women “were not in fact riding broomsticks or having sex with the devil,” according to feminist historian Anne Llewellyn Barstow, they were “healing, both by spells and potions, delivering babies, performing abortions, predicting the future, advising the lovelorn, cursing, removing curses, making peace between neighbors.” The availability of such services, however wholesome they may appear to modern eyes, was quite enough to arouse fear and loathing in the Church and to bring down the terrible wrath of the Inquisition.
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By another irony, the Witch Craze failed to strike any sparks in Spain, where the Inquisition operated on a vast and terrifying scale but chose an entirely different target, as we shall see. After some eighteen hundred men and women confessed to witchcraft during the period of grace at the opening of an
inquisitio
in Navarre in 1612, the Spanish Inquisition conducted a formal inquiry, calling on chemists to examine the contents of the witches’ supposed potions and recruiting doctors to determine whether women who claimed to have engaged in sexual intercourse with Satan were, in fact, still virgins. “I have not found indications from which to infer that a single act of witchcraft has really occurred,” wrote the same skeptical Spanish inquisitor quoted above. Even in places where women were burned as witches in appalling numbers, some sober observers were willing to allow only that “witches were persons whose minds had been deranged and imaginations corrupted by demons,” and they insisted that such victims of delusion and derangement “were not responsible for their actions and confessions any more than the insane.”
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Nevertheless, a kind of madness seemed to seize the collective imagination. An act of adultery, a failed marriage, a miscarriage or a stillbirth, an infertile woman or an impotent man, a dispute between neighbors, the failure of a business or a crop, a batch of beer that went bad, a plate of spoiled oysters that resulted in a case of food poisoning—any such commonplace of ordinary life might provoke an accusation of witchcraft. For example, when a midwife named Dichtlin, and her daughter, Anna, were accused of witchcraft by their neighbors in a Swiss village in 1502, one witness complained that when his late mother was also working as a midwife, “women called his mother in more than they did Dichtlin, and in time his mother went down with a long illness, and when she came to die, she swore, as she hoped to be saved, that it was Dichtlin’s doing.” Another witness reported that he had once seen Anna looking into a stream and splashing water between her legs, “and before he got home, there was a heavy downpour.” Such was the
fama
—that is, pure speculation and slander—that served as evidence in the proceedings of the Inquisition.
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